I had a fun Friday evening. I received a Slack notification sent to everyone in our group stating that the iOS app was crashing on launch. This came as a surprise to me, because our most recent release had been out for several weeks at this point. It also was the most stable release in terms of number of crashes we’ve ever released. This was a good point release.

After a few minor heart palpitations, I grab a few iOS devices and try launching the App Store version of the app. Success. No crashes for me. A few other team members launch the app successfully as well. At this point, I make a suggestion straight out of Microsoft’s 1990’s playbook: restart your phone. No more crashing on launch.

My theory was correct. I’ve seen a few times in the last few months where an app will randomly begin crashing on launch for no rhyme or reason. I’ve never really tried debugging it because it wasn’t my app crashing, but now I was annoyed. I made a point to check the iOS device console next time I saw one of my apps doing this weird crash on launch behavior.

Fast forward to yesterday when I wanted to check a few things in the Major League Baseball app. I tapped the MLB icon and . . . crash. Rinse. Repeat. I decided to go on a round-robin through my apps and see if any others are crashing. Turns out Medium, United Airlines, and Pocket are also crashing. The odds of four of these major apps all shipping at-launch crashers at once are good enough to make you rich in Vegas. At this point, I am pretty confident what’s going on but I’m not at home so I can’t easily plug my phone in and see what’s happening. I’ll just have to forgo three of my most used apps because I’m not restarting my phone yet.

Once I get home, I plugged my iPhone into my Mac, popped open device console in Xcode and tried launching the failing apps again. Here’s what spit out:

Fairplay is the DRM Apple uses for App Store (and iTunes purchases in general). Something is going wrong with the DRM on these apps causing them to fail to launch. Confidence inspiring!

This is as far as my investigation has taken me at this point. I don’t really have a theory what is causing this. My first thought was it was caused by an app being updated, but the United app hadn’t been updated in a while and it was crashing for no reason. I am mostly writing this up because when I was trying to defend that this was an iOS issue and not a bug in our code, I really didn’t have much of a source to cite other than the few tweets I remembered seeing from other folks running into the same issue. I’d love to know more if you have any theories.